Provide Maurice Cranston's and Thomas Pogge's accounts of human rights. How do they differ or similar? Evaluate their accounts from your point of view and explain your reasons.
Maurice Cranston was controversial in his views on human rights as he thought that the welfare state did not really exist at all and did not actually provide the respite for which it was created. He was also an objector to conflict in the Second World War and was a great pacifist as he was also very much an opinionist on world affairs and his account of human rights focused on the aspect that individualism was always paramount.
Cranston was also very much a rightist on political matters after the Second World War focusing on individualism as a way to gain human rights. He believed that the welfare state was inherently flawed as it was liable to be corrupted and was also important in the sense that it could not actually reach the right conclusion for which it was devised.
For Cranston, human rights came from the essential element of liberalism which meant that someone should be always allowed the basic necessities of life but these should also be tempered with what can be achieved by the collective. I find this approach to be rather contradictory as it is impossible to achieve everything in one fell swoop but there must always be a gradual approach to human rights in this perspective. From that angle, it does appear that Cranston was slightly flawed although this is also arguable.
Thomas Pogge is much more leftist in his views of human rights and has been scathingly critical of the Western world on a number of issues including the fact that according to him, the Western neo liberal economy is making the world’s poor far poorer than they already are. He also comes up with the thesis that there should be free medicines accessible to all those who cannot afford them, in fact according to him this is a basic human right which cannot be denied.
Pogge is also very harsh in his criticism of the way the world is run in the neo liberal capitalist sense. He holds the view that the west is restricting the development of poor nations by keeping them slaves to the freewheeling economic system and this is being done in denial of their basic human rights which is something that cannot be condemned too harshly. In this sense he obviously differs greatly from Cranston’s view which basically supports individualism and economic liberalism.
In this sense, Pogge argues that the basic tenet of human rights is to have what may be considered as the essentials to live a decent life. This includes access to a decent diet of food and water, the ability to determine one’s own destiny and also access to education and basic health services. This is definitely something which has to be had by all if human rights are to be respected, at least according to Pogge.
So one can conclude that both philosophers have completely opposing views on human rights with Cranston focusing on individualism and neo liberal rightist views and Pogge more attuned to the leftist and liberal viewpoint. Although both have their merits, I subscribe to the latter viewpoint as it ensures that society is far more balanced than it is with a rightist viewpoint.
Works Cited:
Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press 2008), pp. 29-30.
Thomas Pogge, “How Not to Count the Poor” (Sanjay Reddy and Thomas Pogge), in Sudhir Anand, Paul Segal and
Joseph Stiglitz, eds.: Debates in the Measurement of Global Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Cranston, Maurice. ‘Human Rights: Real and Supposed,’ in Political Theory and the Rights of Man, edited by D. D. Raphael (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 43-51
Seldon, Arthur.The virtues of capitalism. Liberty Fund, 2004 ISBN 0865975507. (p. 415)
